Category Archives: religion

The GOP is in a reactionary phase right now, more than anything. A time of responding to the leftward-drifting political landscape and, rather than modifying their positions on key issues, hunkering down and redoubling the anti-progressive stances. In a lot of ways, the United States is less progressive than it was in the past, less accepting of sweeping changes to the way we do things. But that’s how the world is: it moves left.

A fun activity, if you’re a history geek, is to dig through revolutionary thinkers of the past and seeing where their ideas and stances are in an absolute sense rather than relativistic. You’ll find that even the most wildly liberal thinkers of bygone days would be almost laughably backward in the 21st century. Anti-slavery advocates didn’t think blacks were equal people, just that slavery was wrong. Even Lincoln didn’t see the negro as rising particularly high in society.

This sounds contradictory, but the point is that the paradigm as a whole will always, always shift to the left. However, what we’re seeing now is such a hard press against it that wasn’t the case throughout American history. Ours has been a country that, generally speaking, prided itself on pressing forward into the new age, forging new territory and showing the world how we as a goddamn species can advance from century to century.

What does that have to do with the Republican Party? Well, everything. Their emotional-level, cranky grandpa response to gay rights, womens rights, secularism and domestic policy are necessarily self-defeating. We’re getting less dogmatically religious (high percentages of people claim Christianity, but the number who believe the Bible literal truth drops every year), women are a larger percentage of the population than men, gays are more comfortable with being open, and whites are slowly losing their majority. So a party that largely appeals to white, Christian males is one that is painting itself into a corner.

The Republicans are going to have to make a decision: step forward into the 21st century, or die off entirely. Time will tell what they do.

“I would not vote for a man who was an atheist because I believe you need to have an acknowledgement or a reverence or a fear for almighty God. And I believe that’s where wisdom comes from,” she said during a panel discussion on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

I can understand one not trusting believers in one capacity or another in that you fear that their particular doctrine would manifest in bad policies or somesuch. But to categorically deny that you’d support any person of a given mode of faith? That’s where the problem arises.

Me? I’ll vote for an atheist, agnostic, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Scientologist, Pastafarian, Norse Pagan, Wiccan, Buddhist, or whatever else you might throw at me as long as their ideals line up with mine. The difference here is that I do not, in any sense, line my support or promotion with anyone based on the labels that they affix to themselves. That label might give me a good indication as to whether or not I’m likely to be on their side, but that’s a different matter.

Then again, I don’t claim to be on the side of an almighty deity. I would assume that if I believed in the big man upstairs, it would only follow suit that I would sweepingly deny anyone who I saw as turning their back on him.

Likely GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney doubled down on his attack against President Obama for allegedly waging a “war on religion” during a town hall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin Monday night, insisting that the Affordable Care Act’s new rule requiring employers to provide preventive health care services like contraception constituted an effort to establish “secularism” as an official religion.

Just to clarify: “secularism” refers to separating religious ideals from the political realm, as in being able to say “well this is what my religion teaches, but as it cannot be applied universally I shan’t force it upon others”.

When Republicans complain about secularism, what they’re basically complaining about is any attempts to make the US not a theocracy.

When people like me talk about the dangers of the religious right, this is what I mean. The worst you can say about “militant atheists” is that they act like douchebags and put up obnoxious billboards.

And once again (because it bears repeating) this is violence enacted with political aims intended to cause fear: terrorism.

“I don’t care what the liberals say, I don’t care what the naysayers say, this nation was founded as a Christian nation…There is only one God and his name is Jesus. I’m tired of people telling me that I can’t say those words.. Listen to me, If you don’t love America, If you don’t like the way we do things I have one thing to say – GET OUT. We don’t worship Buddha, we don’t worship Mohammad, we don’t worship Allah, we worship God, we worship God’s son Jesus Christ.”

If you swapped out “Jesus” for “Mohammad” and “God” for “Allah”, this wouldn’t look at all out of place in a Taliban introduction.

Rick Santorum 2012: if you don’t worship Christ, you aren’t welcome in America.

But one shocking detail in that story seemed to be overlooked in the AP’s lead: A criminal complaint against the group, obtained by Raw Story on Thursday, shows that Green’s sister believes he killed Ramirez “because Ramirez did not believe in God.”

All the details still aren’t in, but that’s close enough to at least get me concerned that it could be the case.